Today the emphasis is to raise awareness of the atrocities of modern slavery and it is not to be confused the other UN day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition. Modern slavery is a disgrace and the UN considers people trafficking, forced and bonded labour, child labour as modern forms of slavery and it is committed to eradicating it.

How many slaves are there in the world today?

According to some sources over a million children are trafficked for sexual exploitation and cheap labour every year all over the world which makes it a global problem. Article four of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, states, “no one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms” and yet, India is estimated with 14 million victims, China with 3.2 million, Parkistan with 2.1 million. Russia 794,000, USA 400,000, Brazil 369,000, Germany 167,000, Italy 145,000, United Kingdom 136,000, France 129,000, Japan 37,000, Canada 17,000 and Australia 15,000. In fact it is estimated 40.3 million people worldwide are subject to some form of modern slavery, despite being illegal everywhere.  

No one knows when slavery began but historians can trace its roots back roughly 12,000 years. Slavery was known in all the early civilizations as far back as Sumer, as well as in almost every other ancient civilization, including ancient Egypt, China, the Akkadian Empire, the Arab Islamic Caliphate and Sultanate, Nubia and the pre-Columbian civilizations. Assyria, Babylonia, Iran, ancient Greece, India, and of course the Roman Empire. We may not be able to change the past but we can the present and the future.  

If we have a “War on Terror” why not a “War on Slavery”?